The Gay Cockade | Page 5

deserved it. But Duncan hated her, too. "You're right," he said one day when we had lunched with Jimmie; "she's sucked him dry." Jimmie had been unusually silent. He had laughed little. He had tapped the table with his finger, and had kept his eyes on his finger. He had been absent-minded. "She has sucked him dry," said Duncan, with great heat.
But she hadn't. That was the surprising thing. Just as we were all giving up hope of Jimmie's proving himself something more than a hack, he did the great thing and the wonderful thing that years ago Elise had prophesied. His play, "The Gay Cockade," was accepted by a New York manager, and after the first night the world went wild about it.
I had helped Jimmie with the name. I had spoken once of youth as a gay cockade. "That's a corking title," Jimmie had said, and had written it in his note-book.
When his play was put in rehearsal, Duncan and I were there to see. We took our month's leave, traveled to New York, and stayed at an old-fashioned boarding-house in Washington Square. Every day we went to the theatre. Elise was always there, looking younger than ever in the sables bought with Jimmie's advance royalty, and with various gowns and hats which were the by-products of his best-sellers.
The part of the heroine of "The Gay Cockade" was taken by Ursula Simms. She was, as those of you who have seen her know, a Rosalind come to life. With an almost boyish frankness she combined feminine witchery. She had glowing red hair, a voice that was gay and fresh, a temper that was hot. She galloped through the play as Jimmie had meant that she should gallop in that first poor draft which he had read to us in Albemarle, and it was when I saw Ursula in rehearsal that I realized what Jimmie had done--he had embodied in his heroine all the youth that he had lost--she stood for everything that Elise had stolen from him--for the wildness, the impetuosity, the passion which swept away prudence and went neck to nothing to fulfilment.
Indeed, the whole play partook of the madness of youth. It bubbled over. Everybody galloped to a rollicking measure. We laughed until we cried. But there was more than laughter in it. There was the melancholy which belongs to tender years set in exquisite contrast to the prevailing mirth.
Jimmie had a great deal to do with the rehearsals. Several times he challenged Ursula's reading of the part.
"You must not give your kisses with such ease," he told her upon one occasion; "the girl in the play has never been kissed."
She shrugged her shoulders and ignored him. Again he remonstrated. "She's frank and free," he said. "Make her that. Make her that. Men must fight for her favors."
She came to it at last, helped by that Rosalind-like quality in herself. She was young, as he had wanted Elise to be, clean-hearted, joyous--girlhood at its best.
Gradually Jimmie ceased to suggest. He would sit beside us in the dimness of the empty auditorium, and watch her as if he drank her in. Now and then he would laugh a little, and say, under his breath: "How did I ever write it? How did it ever happen?"
Elise, on the other side of him, said, at last, "I knew you could do it, Jimmie."
"You thought I could do great things. You never knew I could do--this--"
It was toward the end of the month that Duncan said to me one night as we rode home on the top of a 'bus, "You don't suppose that he--"
"Elise thinks it," I said. "It's waking her up."
Elise and Jimmie had been married fifteen years, and had never had a honeymoon, not in the sense that Jimmie wanted it--an adventure in romance, to some spot where they could forget the world of work, the world of sordid things, the world that was making Jimmie old. Every summer Jimmie had asked for it, and always Elise had said, "Wait."
But now it was Elise who began to plan. "When your play is produced, we'll run away somewhere. Do you remember the place you always talked about--up in the hills?"
He looked at her through his round glasses. "I can't get away from this"--he waved his hand toward the stage.
"If it's a success you can, Jimmie."
"It will be a success. Ursula Simms is a wonder. Look at her, Elise. Look at her!"
Duncan and I could look at nothing else. As many times as I had seen her in the part, I came to it always eagerly. It was her great scene--where the girl, breaking free from all that has bound her, takes the hand of her vagabond lover and goes forth, leaving behind wealth and a marriage of distinction,